It came to my attention recently (last Thursday) that someone-it-might-have-been-me-and-the-person-who-told-me-definitely-wanted-it-to-be-me lost sixty thousand dollars of someone else’s money. Money that we were supposed to pay these other people in October, and didn’t pay them, and– to further compound the error– money that they have been paying people with during the several months since then.

Yes, they were paying people with money from an empty account. I’m not a CPA. I don’t know how that works or how it takes eight months to notice sixty grand is missing. I do know that it’s a problem when it’s discovered, though. So most of the last couple of days at work has been a horrible process of collecting evidence that, no, for a variety of reasons this shit wasn’t my fault, although that was only after half a day or so of oh shit I’m so fucking fired before I started putting together what had actually happened.

Meanwhile, I’m looking for jobs that have mostly so far involved at least some degree of budgetary supervision. So “lost sixty grand once” will look real good on a résumé.

At any rate, we got that cleared up, and I was able to prove to a fair degree of certainty that shit was not my fault, and came up with a way to solve the larger problem once you get past “not my fault!” of how do we pay this while I was at it. There is a reason I never delete emails, people, and it’s so that I can print them out eight months later with dates and times and certain key phrases highlighted.

Plus, also, we discovered they never actually invoiced us. That’s kinda a problem. If you expect someone to send you sixty grand you probably ought to actually generate the piece of paper necessary to ask for it.

But anyway! Late Friday afternoon I discovered another problem, and this one definitely was my fault: I had somehow managed to adjust an amount in a certain budget line to a total that was actually less than the amount of funds we had already expended from that budget line, and that without everything submitted for the year yet. So today’s hell stress was trying to figure out how we were going to fix that problem. We got it taken care of by noon, but there was a point in the day where I was seriously trying to figure out how to explain to my wife that I owed my job three grand. Because this shit was definitely my fault.

But that’s fixed now too.

I’ve used up all my mistakes and good luck for June, and I’m still battling bronchitis. I need the rest of the month to go easy, thanks.